The White Shirt (English Edition) [Kindle-editie] beoordelingen het boek quotes

Obsessed with the idea of escape and retreat in post-9/11 America, Laura Vecsey sets off to buy land in rural West Virginia. Instead, the former Baltimore Sun sports columnist met James R. Jacques, a 79-year-old landowner. He agrees to meet her and discuss selling her a few of the hundreds of acres he owns in three states, but he never sells her a single acre. Instead, over the course of their brief but intense friendship -- as Jim’s health declines from Parkinson’s Disease -- Jim gives her something far more valuable: a lesson of a lifetime.A physicist who never married, isolated by choice on his 120-acre farm, Jim was multi-millionaire who hoarded his food and money and his many parcels of beautiful rural land. As he told the story of his life (the death of his mother, the Depression, his capture at the Battle of the Bulge) it was clear that Jim’s accumulation of wealth was an obsessive attempt to stanch the pain of his childhood poverty. But the economic poverty became another sort of poverty. As he stubbornly clung to the possessions he would soon leave behind, it was clear: No amount of land or wealth could bring a person peace or make him truly free.